Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hnfong 1053 days ago
Context is important.

C++ is generally used by millions of people to whom execution time matters quite a bit. The language is literally designed to force the programmer to decide how to balance CPU cycles with language abstractions and features. It's already hard to debug compared with a lot of other languages (which are generally slower).

The fact that you (and GGP) rarely encounter situations where run time is critical is a limitation on your experience, not a universal law that applies everywhere.

So, context is really important here.

1 comments

>The language is literally designed

I think that is a matter of some debate.

This isn't even debatable.

>> Efficiency has been a major design goal for C++ from the beginning, also the principle of “zero overhead” for any feature that is not used in a program. It has been a guiding principle from the earliest days of C++ that “you don’t pay for what you don’t use”.

https://www.stroustrup.com/Performance-TR.pdf